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I always have so much trouble deciding where to post....CPU? Motherboard/Chipset? System Builder's Anonymous? You can almost never talk about one component to the exclusion of all others.

Anyhow, I would like to know if there are people here who are using two E5-26xx CPUs in a workstation type of system (as opposed to a server). I am curious about hex and octa core systems and all of the reading material that I'm able to find doesn't really help me understand on an "apples-to-apples" basis.

Currently, my budget does not support spending $1200 on two E5 CPUs or $600 for a motherboard. But I am curious and would like to learn more about this type of system. My usage interests are DAW, animation/3d rendering, and folding.

For the two examples below, I tried to pick processors with the same number of cores and roughly close in speed and price, and I would assume either a Geforce 680 or 690 as well as 64 GB RAM and competently fast HDDs or SSDs.

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Example E5 system:

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2630

Motherboard: ASUS Z9PE-D8 WSDual LGA 2011 Intel C602

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Example i7 SB-E system (this is actually what I am planning to build):

CPU: Intel Core i7-3930K

Motherboard: ASUS P9X79 WS LGA 2011 Intel X79

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Question 1 - How much better could the E5 system be expected to perform for multithreaded applications?

Question 2 - How much more electricity might it cost to run a dual E5 system such as the example above?

Question 3 - It seems like the industry is trending toward UEFI but it looks like server class E5 motherboards don't support UEFI. Should this be a major consideration?

Question 4 - If I were to build a dual processor system, I'd like to plan on keeping it in service for 5+ years. Is this a reasonable expectation?

You can look at this that way, raw compute: 12x2.3ghz vs 6x3.2ghz
a rate of 27.6 vs 19.2

So the dual will be 40% faster in the absolute best possible case, possibly achievable with some rendering workload.

Otherwise it will be slower. Worse case is with 1 to 6 thread running. Where the single cpu solution will be 40% faster.

I also been wanting to build an Intel Core i7-3930K based PC, but I'm waiting for a price drop. Cant justify $600 for a CPU

Do they make a dual socket board for 1155 workstation cpus???? if they do i would look down that road i am sure you would get better performance then a 3930k build. But i do not even know if they make a dual cpu 1155 board. If they do i wonder what the fastest cpu you could get??? 2600k workstation equivalent ?
Sure as hell would use a lot less power then a dual 2011 board.

I do know the 3.1ghz 8 core 2011 server chip with HT/16 threads and i think 30mb cache, costs around 1600$ just for the 150watt tdp cpu

sschaem wrote:

You can look at this that way, raw compute: 12x2.3ghz vs 6x3.2ghz
a rate of 27.6 vs 19.2

So the dual will be 40% faster in the absolute best possible case, possibly achievable with some rendering workload.

Otherwise it will be slower. Worse case is with 1 to 6 thread running. Where the single cpu solution will be 40% faster.

I also been wanting to build an Intel Core i7-3930K based PC, but I'm waiting for a price drop. Cant justify $600 for a CPU

That's an interesting way to look at it. So to get comparable speeds with the E5-2600 (when employing only 1 to 6 threads), I'd have to jump up to two 3.something ghz CPUs.

Here's the fastest 8-core E5. That's a killer price.

vargis14 wrote:

Do they make a dual socket board for 1155 workstation cpus???? if they do i would look down that road i am sure you would get better performance then a 3930k build. But i do not even know if they make a dual cpu 1155 board. If they do i wonder what the fastest cpu you could get??? 2600k workstation equivalent ? Sure as hell would use a lot less power then a dual 2011 board.

Nope, to go with non-2011 dual sockets, you need to go to socket 1366, which is the predecessor to socket 2011. Based on my reading, 1366 gives up quite a lot:

1. 1366 has no PCIe 3.0, and fewer lanes.
2. Only SATA II is on board; no SATA III
3. Only USB 1.1 and 2.0; no USB 3.0
4. No Firewire 1394

So I'd have to add cards for SATA III, USB 3.0, and Firewire (for my audio interface). With all that, I'd be running out of slots, which is the problem I have today.

I do know the 3.1ghz 8 core 2011 server chip with HT/16 threads and i think 30mb cache, costs around 1600$ just for the 150watt tdp cpu

LOL, yeah with two of those maybe I could cook meat while heating my house!